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Thursday, 13 April 2017

2nd New Jersey

It's been much too long since my last post - usual reasons of too much work and a severe reduction of painting time over the past couple of months. This is the 2nd New Jersey, a regiment raised at the end of 1775 under the command of Colonel William Maxwell. It saw action fairly quickly by being assigned to the army investing Quebec. The regiment returned to New Jersey at the end of the men's one-year enlistment and was immediately reformed. By this time, Maxwell had been promoted to Brigadier-General and the regiment was assigned to his New Jersey brigade within the division commanded by William Stirling. Command of the regiment passed to Israel Shreve, whose teenage son had also enlisted. The 2nd New Jersey was at Brandywine, Germantown and Monmouth. In 1779 the regiment was part of General John Sullivan's campaign against the Iroquois and was subsequently stationed back in New Jersey, where it saw further action at Springfield in June 1780. After a further period of "garrison" duty, in August 1781 the regiment marched to Yorktown with the rest of the New Jersey Brigade to bring the war to its end. In June 1783 the regiment was disbanded.

This unit is the first of two that I painted to use up my remaining "firing line" Continental figures. The second is a bulking-up of an existing unit that I'll post about at the weekend. I had intended to paint a Connecticut regiment in brown coats, but information on the likely uniforms of the unit I had in mind has moved on and I'll be using Perry plastic figures instead. Looking through the "British Grenadier!" scenario books, I noticed that some scenarios require large units where a single Continental regiment is split into "wings"; and so for those units you need forty or more figures wearing the same uniform. With that in mind, I saw that if I painted this larger 24-figure unit in dark blue faced red coats, with a handful of figures in hunting shirts, then I could combine it with some existing (much older) units such as the 2nd Maryland, the 8th Maryland and even the very smart Delaware Regiment. Adding those 3 units to the 2nd New Jersey gives me a largely uniform regiment of 78 figures. Using up left over figures means that the 2nd New Jersey has representatives from the Foundry, Perry and Eureka ranges. These are all broadly compatible, of course, although in the command stand the Eureka drummer looks rather well fed and tall next to the more slender Perry officer. I decided to group the remaining Eureka "ragged" Continentals and the hunting shirt types on the same base, to suggest a company that is awaiting its new issue of uniforms. There is a second Perry officer on that base simply because I ran out of rank-and-file figures.

The flag is the one usually referred to as "Maxwell's New Jersey" flag. I've had it for years and was having difficulty finding a use for it, and it seemed appropriate for the 2nd New Jersey to carry. It certainly makes a nice change from anything with stars and stripes.

On the workbench at the moment are more Continental and Loyalist cavalry, and a couple of other things. More soon, I hope. In the meantime, happy Easter to all readers!

Your painting of Foundry and Perry AWI figures , for me , is simply the best examples anywhere on the web. Allied with the potted history of each unit it adds up to a tremendous resource for the period. I check regularly for each post and am currently slowly painting figures and collecting the British Grenadier scenarios , all thanks to your efforts.